Sleep

Why do I think about how I think?

I do find it fascinating.  Hoping that it’s not all rooted in some hideous narcissistic obsession. 

I worked hard at the keyboard yesterday to cement in place a particular passage in Brahms op. 76 #2. I made progress, but at the end of the day I still couldn’t get through it reliably and without considerable anxiety. I tried hard, but it just didn’t stick; countless repetitions didn’t make it natural. I was a little discouraged, but I didn’t freak out.

What's happening in there?

Today, I sit down (without warming up) and play through that piece, and all is well.  I execute that passage in the new way without a problem. Why is that? Today was many hours away from yesterday’s practice. If anything, I would expect some backsliding from yesterday's endpoint, but instead today it works, with no practice between yesterday and today. What changed?

Can it be that the brain sometimes needs time to process a new approach?  “Do it this way now!” may not be enough, especially if this way is very different from the old way.  We somehow understand the new way, but can’t get far enough away from the old way so quickly. It takes a little unconscious mental effort to shelve the old way and accept the new.

I’m starting to think that a particularly important factor in making that transition easier is a good night’s sleep.  There really does seem to be some kind of hard drive defrag that happens while we sleep that makes everything work more efficiently.  Part of that defrag may be that we archive more deeply the old pattern that we've decided is no longer optimal.  Maybe we can’t so easily move it off to a remote folder with different access rights when we’re awake and conscious.  It took effort to put that pattern into memory, so why should we surrender it so easily?  Perhaps that pattern was part of a crucial survival mechanism?  If so, we give it up at our own peril.

We understand so little of what sleep really accomplishes.  Surely it has nothing to do with physical exhaustion or lack of energy.  We consume enough calories to keep us going for more than 14-18 hours at a stretch. But our brains seem to require time to recalibrate and move thoughts, patterns, and memories among the various levels of storage that are available to us. We need a period of time without new input for the brain to sort through recent data and experience. Without it, we get confused and frustrated.

And that same ability to recalibrate and re-store is what makes memory so subjective and so unreliable. We remember what's useful for us to remember.  Truth be damned.

The computer hardware industry doubles capacity and processing speed every few years.  The human brain evolves much more slowly.  I’m ready for an upgrade.  How about you?